“‘I don’t know’ isn’t good enough, Ingo.” I felt choked with tears, with anger. “Come on, you’re a smart guy. You can do better than that.”
“Amity—”
“Tell me! What’s going on?”
He stiffened. “What’s going on is that I need some time, and you seem hell-bent not to give me any!”
I was shaking. “Sorry, pal – you don’t get time after what happened last night!”
He straightened quickly and gripped my arms. “Fine, you want me to say things I’ll regret? Yes, it was a mistake! I’ve been awake for hours wishing I could forget it ever happened! Happy now?”
I shoved away from him, my pulse crashing in my ears. We stared at each other.
“You asshole,” I whispered.
Ingo gave a hollow laugh and pinched the bridge of his nose hard. “True,” he said. He stood motionless in the dawn glow.
“I’m sorry I’ve let you down,” he said tightly. “Believe me, you’re not the only one. I need you to be my friend, all right?”
I need you to be my friend.
It was what I’d said to him that night on the roof. Was this some kind of joke? Some way of getting back at me? But Ingo wouldn’t do that.
I’d never have believed that he’d sleep with me and then want to forget it ever happened either.
I couldn’t speak. I felt punched. I went to the corner where we’d lain the night before. I could see marks in the dust from our feet, and from where my hand had gripped at nothing, flexing over and over. Remembering how right it had felt – both at the time and lying in his arms afterwards – my chest ached.
Somehow I’d done it again.
The ghost of Collie hovered. No – I refused to cry. I grabbed up Ingo’s jacket from the floor. I went back and shoved it at him.
“You may not get to forget it,” I said curtly. “We didn’t use a proph. I’ll let you know if I’m pregnant.”
Ingo tensed; he shut his eyes. Then he pulled on his jacket with mechanical motions. “So I was an idiot in more ways than one,” he muttered. “Yes. Tell me if you are.”
Having to travel through the city with Ingo that morning was a mix of pain and euphoria.
As we learned later, the World United troops had taken the airport and the southern half of the island by midnight – just about the time that the Shadowcars had started arriving in upper Pisces in such force.
Almost every Gun on the island was in Capricorn and Pisces by then. The other ten sectors were liberated by the WU troops easily. By the time Ingo and I were standing at the cottage window in Little France, listening to the bridges being blown up, people at the southern end of the island were popping champagne on street corners while skirmishes still took place only blocks away.
Some of the remaining Guns started trying to leave the city, given orders to retreat by panicked superiors. Others were told to stay, to keep fighting. For hours, battles continued in the last two occupied sectors as World United’s troops defeated Pierce’s. She’d had twenty tanks altogether. The WU had mortar launchers specially designed to fight them.
Ingo and I got out of Pisces that morning along with thousands of others – the checkpoint leading into Aquarius was now controlled by WU troops. The sign with the water-bearer on it had been torn down. A new sign was up: This way to the free zones of New Manhattan!
The WU troops wore new blue uniforms. As we passed through, they held out buckets for everyone to discard their Harmony IDs in. A grinning soldier handed out candy to the children.
Despite everything, my heart was singing in that moment. Finally, others were here to help us take care of this. Finally, Kay Pierce’s regime was on its way out.
The soldier holding the bucket recognized me and excitedly called his superior over – a woman with gleaming blonde hair.
“Miss Vancour!” She drew Ingo and me over to one side. “You have made it,” she said fervently, shaking my hand. Sidonie Durand, said her name tag. “Congratulations. Burning that giant Harmony flag? Genius!”
I thought of the snipers from our group who’d died in the stairwell. I managed a thin smile.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Were you in the Resistance too?” Sidonie asked Ingo brightly, and it startled me to hear the past tense. So many months of struggling, planning. So many deaths. And now it was over with.
“Yes. Ingo Manfred,” said Ingo. His expression was drawn. We’d hardly spoken since leaving Little France.
Sidonie shook his hand, hardly flinching at his scar. She smiled at me. “So I suppose you want to know the way to the billeted accommodations, yes?”
At my furrowed brow, she explained, “We’ve taken over the old Grand Hotel, on Bridge Street. It’s the nearest to the airport; our pilots will need lodgings. I heard you were one of the best, Miss Vancour. Were you a pilot too, Mr Manfred?”
“Tier Two,” he said after a pause. “European Alliance.”
“C’est magnifique! There are many of the old EA gang here, so you wouldn’t be alone. You’ll both be joining us?” Sidonie glanced hopefully from Ingo to me. “We need everyone we can get – Pierce won’t waste time trying to get this island back.”
No, I almost said. After all that had happened, did I really want to keep fighting? Yet thinking of the gathering pilots, somehow a different answer came out.
“Yes, I’ll join,” I said softly.
Ingo’s eyes were bitter. “I will too,” he said finally. “I might as well.”
I could hardly look at him. The confused cocktail of pain and anger was too much.
I cleared my throat. “Could you possibly help me find my brother?” I asked Sidonie. “And some friends of mine?”
A few phone calls later, I learned to my relief that Hal was already at the Grand, along with Harlan and Vera – they’d gotten everyone out of Henderson Square Garden safely.
“Would you like a lift?” suggested Sidonie. “I’ve got the best jeep that the WU offers, right here at your service.”
I stood gazing down the recently-liberated street. “You go,” I said to Ingo. “I’m going to walk for a little bit.”
He drew me to one side, dropping his hand from my arm almost immediately.
“Amity…” he started.
I’d tensed at his touch. “I mean it. I want to be alone,” I said quietly. “And, Ingo…I think it’s best if we stay away from each other for a while.”
He stood motionless. Finally he looked away and gave a soft snort.
“Fine,” he said. “I understand.”
As I walked through the New Manhattan streets there were impromptu parties on almost every block I passed. The morning was dawning cooler than usual, giving a fresh tinge to the day. People had brought tables outside, and phono players. I had three glasses of champagne before I’d even reached Sagittarius sector – people kept pushing them into my hand.
Music soared through the air – scratchy, beloved discs that had been kept hidden during Kay Pierce’s reign. Despite everything, I relished it. I laughed as a man grabbed me to dance a few turns of a once-forbidden jitterbug, then left me for another partner.
People were gleefully tearing down anything to do with astrology. In Aquarius I saw a water-bearer statue toppled from a fountain as a crowd cheered. The astrology shops looked abandoned, their windows broken; one street was roasting frankfurters over a bonfire of astrology books. In what used to be Sagittarius, a restaurant owner tore down a sign saying Archer’s Delight.
“It’s Frank’s Place again!” he shouted, throwing his arms towards the sky.
When I got tired of walking, I took the subway the rest of the way to the Grand.
Here, too, people had been busy – the old signs admonishing people to watch out for Discordants and to listen to Pierce’s nightly talk were gone, except for one that had a moustache and horns drawn on her image. They suited her.
I hoped she was scared, wherever she was. I hoped she felt hunted.
When I went u
p the stairs leading from the subway station to Bridge Street, a flower vendor was giving out free roses. “A pretty flower for a pretty lady,” he said with a bow.
I took it with a smile. Yellow – my favourite colour.
The airport bloomed incongruously here, on the tip of the island, but the Grand was still a fine old hotel, only a short walk from its complex. Holding the flower, I jogged across the street when the light changed and entered the hotel’s gold swinging doors. People wearing WU uniforms were clustered outside, smoking. They parted when I approached.
“Hey, aren’t you…” started one, and then fell silent.
Inside, the hotel was lavish, with red velvet sofas and gilt-patterned walls. Even so, it had a bustling, military air now: a World United desk had been set up near the front of the lobby. A sign read, Check in here, THEN get your room key!
I went over. The uniformed man behind the desk looked up. His eyes widened behind his glasses as he took me in: the torn, dirty dress; my smudged arms and face. I was still holding the rose.
There had been a giant zodiac wheel painted on the wall. Decorators were already whitewashing it out. My throat suddenly felt tight. I lay the rose gently down on the desk.
“Pilot Amity Vancour, checking in,” I said.
The man gave a slow nod, his eyes never leaving mine. “Welcome, Wildcat.”
PART TWO
OCTOBER 1942
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Scramble! ”
The shout echoed up and down the hallway. I’d already tumbled out of bed at the first sirens.
“No,” I muttered as I yanked on my flight suit. Kay Pierce’s bombers would not destroy more of this city.
Doors were slamming all over. I wrestled my boots on and raced out of my room without turning off the lights.
Other pilots were running down the opulent hallway too. Some had wet hair, as if they’d just taken showers. Though we were on the fifth floor, none of us waited for the elevator – too slow. We streamed down the concrete service stairs, our footsteps thundering.
As I burst out into the pre-dawn air, I caught sight of Vera ahead of me. We fell into pace together, jogging the few hundred yards to the airport entrance.
“Where’s Harlan?” I panted out. Searchlights were already sweeping the sky, eerily bright against this blacked-out section of the city.
“Not sure – he’d gotten a poker game together. I don’t know what floor it was on.” Vera glanced over her shoulder at the dark form of the Grand.
Harlan hadn’t asked me to join the game, but I wasn’t really surprised; he’d asked me a dozen times already these past weeks and I’d always said no. I couldn’t even say why I didn’t want to. Maybe it all felt too tangled up with my previous life back on the Western Seaboard base, when I’d been so sure Collie was the one – so oblivious to the fact that I hardly knew him.
My capacity for misjudging men wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
Jeeps waited at the airport gates, engines already running. We piled into one with several other pilots. The driver barrelled us across the long stretch of pavement. The Firedoves supplied by World United waited in long rows, noses pointed towards the sky as if aching to leap into it. Fitters swarmed over the planes, readying them, warming the engines.
It had been less than a month since New Manhattan’s liberation. It was impossible to believe. Surely we’d been billeted here for ever; fighting here for ever. After I’d checked in that first day, I’d only managed a few hours of familiarizing myself with the new planes before the attacks had started. Kay Pierce hadn’t let up since.
I’d learned that same day that my brother had become a fitter.
“What?” I’d said, staring at him.
“I’ve signed up,” Hal had repeated. We’d been standing on the edge of the airfield, me in my new flight suit and Hal looking unfamiliar in the blue jumpsuit that all the fitters wore.
“How?” I demanded, fear for him sharpening my voice. “You’re only fifteen!”
He shrugged, lifting his voice as a Dove touched down nearby, all power and speed. “You can sign contracts at fifteen in the EA, and those are the laws the WU is operating under.”
When I didn’t answer, he said levelly, “I grew up around planes too, you know. I still remember the preflight sequence. I’m not going to just go home to Ma, with all this going on.”
You could die. I didn’t say it. He wasn’t an idiot; he knew. Behind us, the Dove’s engine came to a stop. Finally I sighed.
“All right,” I said. “But you get to be the one to write to Ma and tell her this.”
When I’d signed up myself, I’d expected people to be like they were on the old Peacefighting base: friendly, but with a distance. Instead there was a real, deep camaraderie from the start. Friendships were formed quickly. Maybe it came from fighting an actual enemy, rather than for an ideal. I already felt as if I’d known some of the other pilots for years.
Hal seemed to feel the same. In between battles I sometimes saw him with a group of fitters and younger pilots, hanging out together in a corner of the bar, all of them obviously close.
I’d rarely seen my brother laugh this past year. Now there was a giddy, hyped-up feel in the air, despite the tiredness, the too-frequent deaths from bombing raids and pilots getting shot down.
It felt like you had to grab life while you could.
As we approached the airfield, Vera sat tapping her red-painted nails on her thigh. “There he is,” she said suddenly as our jeep slowed.
At first I thought she meant Ingo, and my heart pinched. But when I followed her gaze, I saw Harlan standing by his plane, putting on his helmet.
Vera shook her head. “Hard to know whether I wish he was back at the hotel, or up in combat.”
The Grand was always a potential target for bombing. I shrugged. “Well, he’d be cursing a blue streak if he hadn’t gotten to one of the planes in time to go up.”
“True. And Harlan in a bad mood is a grumpy man indeed.”
Our jeep lurched to a halt. We jumped out and headed over to him.
“Those damn sirens interrupted my poker game!” Harlan shouted with a grin over the roar of the Firedoves. He murmured something in Vera’s ear and they kissed briefly; then he swung himself up into his plane, his big form nimble.
When I reached my own plane, I clambered onto the wing. The new World United emblem was on each one: an image of the earth with a dove guarding it, wings outstretched.
As I climbed into my cockpit, I glanced around the airfield, at all the rows and rows of planes. Propeller after propeller erupted into whirling fury. The planes in front were already starting to taxi, getting into position in long lines.
My gaze snagged on a tall, thin pilot pulling on a helmet a few rows over.
I looked quickly away and slid into my cockpit.
The sirens changed to short, fierce blasts. The enemy planes were close now. Tess, our squadron leader – a former Peacefighter like all of us, and the highest-ranking Tier One here – jogged down the lines, shouting, “Don’t get distracted by the Scorpions! Go for the bombers!”
I waved to show I’d heard and then my focus narrowed to the familiar black control panel. Undercarriage down, flaps up, mixture control to rich. The engine was already grumbling, the cockpit vibrating around me. I gave the primer pump a few quick strokes.
Hal appeared. He hopped onto the wing and helped strap me in, his dark hair mussed. In the last four weeks his motions had become deft.
“Ready?” he said, raising his voice over the engine.
I nodded and pulled on my goggles. “Thanks, Hal.”
He shouted down, “Chocks away! Give ’em hell, Sis,” he added, briefly clasping my shoulder, and then he slid down the wing and was gone, another blue-suited figure running away across the dawn-tinged airfield.
I slid the hood shut. The Dove wobbled from side to side as I taxied into position. It was a MK12. It climbed faster than my old MK9 and ha
d a higher top speed, but personally I thought we’d lost something on the overall manoeuvrability. I wasn’t alone – WU pilots argued the MK12’s pros and cons late into the night sometimes. Half loved the newer version and half of us longed for the old ones.
I reached the runway. The plane ahead of me took off, growing smaller in the sky; I counted five and hit the throttle. My Dove’s vibrations shook through me; my hand stayed steady as I travelled down the grey river of runway. As it became a blur I drew back the stick and the Dove and I lifted into the sky.
The buildings of New Manhattan swam into view below. They shrunk and angled to one side as I banked, circling for height.
More planes took off after me, over a hundred of us altogether. The old Western Seaboard base had been busy like this sometimes, when everyone’s scheduled fights had come up around the same time – but we’d all been heading off in different directions, to fight single opponents.
Now I could see the enemy planes approaching from behind the Statue of Freedom – three bombers up high like bloated birds, and swarms of Scorpions protecting them, a shifting mass against the sunrise. Kay Pierce’s air force had the red-and-black Harmony swirl on each wing, with a spiky scorpion at its centre.
I wondered how long it would take before she put her Scorpio sun-sign on every Harmony symbol.
I was in a mile-tall vortex of planes, all of us fighting for height. Don’t get distracted by the Scorpions. Tess was right – but you still had to get past them alive, and protect your comrades if you could.
One moment I was surrounded only by other Doves. Then a shadow crossed over me: the first bomber was above.
The horizon lifted as I roared higher, Gs tugging at my stomach. A red-and-black swirl flashed in my mirrors. I darted away, keeping my eye on the bomber. Higher – higher. Three more Scorps appeared and I fired on them, pulled back – got a few rounds in on the bomber before I had to swoop away.
Checking your mirrors had never been more vital. My blood pulsed as I tried to keep watch on all positions at once. We’d never realized how easy we had it as Peacefighters, battling only one other plane. Even with cloud cover, you knew they could only come at you from one direction at a time.